Elections
Cooke launches 3rd Congressional District bid
Just over four months since November’s election, Rebecca Cooke said Tuesday that she’s entering the 2026 race for the 3rd Congressional seat held by Representative Derrick Van Orden.
Cooke lost to the Republican Van Orden by 2.8 percent on November 5.
This is her third attempt to win the seat. Besides November 2024, she finished second in 2022 in the Democratic primary to Brad Pfaff who lost to Van Orden that November.
In a statement from her campaign released Tuesday morning, she said,
“I’m running for Congress because Wisconsin families deserve a fair shot and a seat at the table,” Cooke said. “While Derrick Van Orden cowers and hides from the people of western Wisconsin, big drug companies are jacking up our medicine prices, out-of-touch elites are blocking pathways to homeownership and good jobs, and chaos continues to dominate Washington. It’s clear we need more working-class voices in Congress who have lived failed policy and will actually fight like hell to rebuild the middle class.”
“We need one of us in Congress – working-class folks who know what our families are going through, how to balance a budget, and spend within their means. I will take on the monopolies that have robbed our families of their farming heritage and decimated our rural economies. I’m focused on results and don’t care who gets the credit, as long as things get done.”
Cooke, a small business owner from the Eau Claire area who runs a non-profit focused on starting women-owned businesses, is the first candidate in Western Wisconsin to announce a run for Congress.
Cooke made her formal announcement that she’s entering the race in Chippewa Falls on Tuesday morning.
More: Rebecca Cooke for Congress
Roy
March 11, 2025 at 2:34 pm
Another politician who runs a non-profit. They multiply like flies.
walden
March 12, 2025 at 10:55 am
So true. Many of these non-profits are layered upon layers of other non-profits, and benefit from a waterfall of government funding dropping through these layers, each layer taking a piece of the action. Even though government employee headcount increased dramatically during the Biden years, they couldn’t send the budget blowout to targeted battleground states fast enough; thus the need for all these non-profits and of course those with favored political views and woke purpose benefited the most. Non-profits are now facing some hard times as funding sources are drying up.